3 research outputs found
Blip-Up Blip-Down Circular EPI (BUDA-cEPI) for Distortion-Free dMRI with Rapid Unrolled Deep Learning Reconstruction
Purpose: We implemented the blip-up, blip-down circular echo planar imaging
(BUDA-cEPI) sequence with readout and phase partial Fourier to reduced
off-resonance effect and T2* blurring. BUDA-cEPI reconstruction with S-based
low-rank modeling of local k-space neighborhoods (S-LORAKS) is shown to be
effective at reconstructing the highly under-sampled BUDA-cEPI data, but it is
computationally intensive. Thus, we developed an ML-based reconstruction
technique termed "BUDA-cEPI RUN-UP" to enable fast reconstruction.
Methods: BUDA-cEPI RUN-UP - a model-based framework that incorporates
off-resonance and eddy current effects was unrolled through an artificial
neural network with only six gradient updates. The unrolled network alternates
between data consistency (i.e., forward BUDA-cEPI and its adjoint) and
regularization steps where U-Net plays a role as the regularizer. To handle the
partial Fourier effect, the virtual coil concept was also incorporated into the
reconstruction to effectively take advantage of the smooth phase prior, and
trained to predict the ground-truth images obtained by BUDA-cEPI with S-LORAKS.
Results: BUDA-cEPI with S-LORAKS reconstruction enabled the management of
off-resonance, partial Fourier, and residual aliasing artifacts. However, the
reconstruction time is approximately 225 seconds per slice, which may not be
practical in a clinical setting. In contrast, the proposed BUDA-cEPI RUN-UP
yielded similar results to BUDA-cEPI with S-LORAKS, with less than a 5%
normalized root mean square error detected, while the reconstruction time is
approximately 3 seconds.
Conclusion: BUDA-cEPI RUN-UP was shown to reduce the reconstruction time by
~88x when compared to the state-of-the-art technique, while preserving imaging
details as demonstrated through DTI application.Comment: Number: Figures: 8 Tables: 3 References: 7